The official guidebooks for the nationwide rail-trails system, the new Rail-Trails series books have an easy-to-use layout and design, clear maps, and precise trip descriptions. With 55 rural, suburban, and urban trails spanning 630 miles, Rail-Trails Southeast covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. Visit historic battlefields, see the world's largest cast-iron statue, travel through a gorge, and watch beavers and herons along the Southeast's historic rail-trails. Includes two-color maps for each trip and succinct directions.

Reprint. Originally published by Dillon Press in 1966.

Since the opening of the first permanent railway in 1833, hundreds of railroad companies have operated in North Carolina. Rail transportation, faster and more efficient than other methods of the era, opened new markets for the products of North Carolina's farms, factories, and mines. Over the years, North Carolina rail companies have ranged in size from well-engineered giants like the Southern Railway to temporary logging railroads like the Hemlock. Cross ties and rails were laid across almost every conceivable terrain: tidal marshes, sand hills, rolling piedmont, and mountain grades. Vulnerable to the turbulent and unregulated economies of the day, few railroad companies escaped reorganizations and receiverships during their corporate lives, often leaving tangled and contradictory histories in their passing.

Recognizing the railroad's importance as both symbol and experience in Victorian America, Amy G. Richter follows women travelers onto trains and considers the consequences of their presence there. For a time, Richter argues, nineteenth-century Americans imagined the public realm as a chaotic and dangerous place full of potential, where various groups came together, collided, and influenced one another, for better or worse. The example of the American railroad reveals how, by the beginning of the twentieth century, this image was replaced by one of a domesticated public realm--a public space in which both women and men increasingly strove to make themselves "at home." Through efforts that ranged from the homey touches of railroad car decor to advertising images celebrating female travelers and legal cases sanctioning gender-segregated spaces, travelers and railroad companies transformed the railroad from a place of risk and almost unlimited social mixing into one in which white men and women alleviated the stress of unpleasant social contact. Making themselves "at home" aboard the trains, white men and women domesticated the railroad for themselves and paved the way for a racially segregated and class-stratified public space that freed women from the home yet still preserved the railroad as a masculine domain.